AREQUIPA, Peru –José Daniel Ferrer, opposition leader of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), is in a delicate state of health after being “brutally beaten” in the prisons of the Castro dictatorship.
Ana Belkis Ferrer, sister of the political prisoner, reported in X (formerly Twitter) that a source who managed to see Ferrer at the Boniato Hospital last Thursday described him as “very thin, brutally beaten and with a wound on his face.”
Likewise, he said that the authorities of the Cuban regime have limited access to the hospital to prevent other people from seeing him and reporting his condition. In this regard, the family demands proof of José Daniel Ferrer’s life.
“We continue to demand proof of life from my brave and selfless brother, as well as his immediate release and that of all detainees and political prisoners, and holding Raul Castro, Diaz Canel and all the hitmen involved in such a brutal and premeditated criminal act responsible.” , wrote Ana Belkis Ferrer on Facebook.
Since November 20, Ferrer’s sister has been denouncing the beating of the opposition leader, which has motivated the claim of activists and organizations in favor of human rights.
Last Thursday, the Council for the Democratic Transition in Cuba (CTDC), chaired by José Daniel Ferrer, ratified the words of Ana Belkis Ferrer and condemned the beating received by the leader.
According to the independent media Cuban Diary, The CTDC statement points out that an event had occurred that they had warned about in recent years: “The coordinator of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU) and president of the Council for the Democratic Transition in Cuba (CTDC) has received a brutal beating in the Mar Verde prison, Santiago de Cuba, and he had to be urgently transferred to the Bonito prison hospital.”
Ferrer has been detained since July 11, 2021 for trying to access the place where the protests were taking place in his province; A month later, a four-year prison sentence that he had been serving since 2020 in house confinement was revoked. This constitutes his third imprisonment for political reasons.
In the 2020 case, he was convicted along with Fernando González Vaillant and Roilán Zárraga Ferrer, who “are already past their time, and are still imprisoned,” Ferrer assured Ortega.
In 2003, José Daniel Ferrer was arrested during Cuba’s Black Spring. At that time he directed the Christian Liberation Movement and the Campaign in favor of the Varela Project in the eastern provinces. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison, after his death sentence was commuted. He was imprisoned for eight years for refusing exile. He was declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International.
The ten years following his release he did not cease his opposition activism: he founded the UNPACU, and presides over the People’s Party and the Council for the Democratic Transition of Cuba.
